History of Photography Instructor: Professor Jaimie Gordon [email protected]
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Course: HUA202 Monday 5:45-9:05 pm LaGuardia Community College History of Photography Instructor: Professor Jaimie Gordon [email protected] HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY -MIDTERM STUDY GUIDE Will cover Sessions 1-6 Assigned readings 1-5 TOTAL POSSIBLE POINTS:118 Multiple Choice/FBlank: 40 point Image ID: 60 point ESSAY: 18 point KNOW THE FOLLOWING INFO FOR: MULTIPLE CHOICE/FILL IN THE BLANK-40 QUESTIONS, 1 POINT EACH The underlined sections will be one of the chioces, and you should retain these answers from the statements. -William Henry Fox Talbot called his images resulting from his early experiments from 1833-1839 photogenic drawings. - Talbot’s ingenious concept evident in his calotype process is a negative from which multiple positives might be made. -Frederick Archer, English sculptor is credited with the collodion process for negatives, referred to as Wet Plate. -Discovered in 1853 in France, and 1856 in England and the US, sensitized collodion used for direct positive images on sheet iron produced what was known as Tintypes. - Albumen is what the paper was called that Blanquart-Evrard, in 1850 developed, and was used with wet plate collodion negatives. -Sir John Herschel discovered sodium thiosulfate as fixer of silver halides in 1820’s, and to make images permanent in 1839, & invented the cyanotype process in 1842, -and also coined the terms, “photography”, “photograph”, “negative”, “positive”, “fixer”. -From 1844-1846, W.H. Fox Talbot created the first publication called The Pencil of Nature to explain & illustrate the scientific & practical applications of photography. -Anna Atkins, worked with cyanotypes and was one of the first woman photographers. But, she was also the first photographer to produce the first photographically illustrated book. -The evolution toward naturalism (from romantic to scientific) in representation can be seen clearly in the artists’ treatment of landscape. -The 19th C. photographic process daguerreotype produced the most detailed image that was delicate, unique, referred to as a mirror with a memory. It could not be reproduced, and was considered a dead end in terms of commercialism. -This photographer and this process, Niepce & Wet Plate do not match each other. These photgraphers and processes do match one another: Daguerre & Daguerreotype, Bayard & Direct Positive, Talbot & Calotype -William Henry Fox Talbot prophesized that “an alliance of science with art will prove conducive to the improvement of both”. 1 -Patented in 1854, by Disderi, and popular till the late 1860’s, carte-de-visite was the inexpensive process that used multiple images on a single glass plate and produced very small paper portrait images mounted on cards, replacing the daguerreotype and resulting in the mass production of photographs. - “I longed to arrest all the beauty that came before me and at length the longing has been satisfied.” Julia Margaret Cameron wrote this statement in regards to capturing beauty in their photography. -Preferring not to photograph women, 19th C. portrait photographer, Nadar, in regards to their photographic portrait work said , “the images are too true to Nature to please the sitters, even the most beautiful” . -The conjunction of appearance and moral character is evident in the fine daguerreotype portraiture that issued from the Boston studio of Southworth and Hawes. - “The pursuit of beauty as a state of grace, a means of retrieving lost innocence”, best describes Lewis Carroll’s photographic philosophy and portraits of children in the 19th C. -Julia Margaret Cameron was influenced by the artistic movement Pre-Raphaelitism in the 19th Century. - John Thomson is the 19th C. Scottish photographer widely regarded as one of the fathers of social documentary photography and best known for his work in China 1873-4, and the streets of London. -The photographic partnership of Hill & Adamson in the 1840’s used the calotype process, and transformed photography into an art form. -The photographer Albert Sands Southworth in 1870 stated, "It should be the aim of the artist-photographer to produce in the likeness the best possible character and finest expression of which that particular face or figure could ever have been capable. But in the result there is to be no departure from truth in the delineation and representation of beauty, and expression, and character." -Waxing the paper negative before exposure was an improvement to the calotype paper process method that evolved from experiments by Blanquart-Evrard and Le Gray, and in the 1850’s resulted in images of extraordinary quality of Landscape and Architecture in France. -The photographic process collodion/albumen made the mechanization of the landscape view possible, and turned the scenic landscape into an item of consumption, and landscape photography into photo-business. -The phrase “manifest destiny” best described the mission of American landscape photography in the West in the 19th C. -19th C. landscape photographer, Carleton E. Watkins was recognized internationally in photographic circles for establishing the mountain as a symbol for transcendent idealism. - Late 19th C. photographer Edward Curtis photographed Indians in North America, vestiges of a culture, he perceived as a “vanishing race”, in an aesthetic manner, softening forms and obscuring detail to emphasize his overall concept of the mythic nature of American Indian life. -The Civil War was the first conflict to be thoroughly photographed with cameramen from 1861 to surrender of 1865. 2 -Photographer, Charles Marville’s 1860’s images of the transformation of Paris, from medieval to a modern city, displayed the character and texture of vanishing ways, indicating that documentary records might be invested with poetic dimension. -An attitude that celebrated the ordinary and unspectacular both in landscape and social activity, describes Naturalism, a 19th C. influential movement for photographers. - 19th C. photographer Oscar Rejlander convinced that visual art should uplift and instruct, and the first to make imaginative use of combination printing, produced an opus entitled, “Two ways of Life”, representing an allegory of the choice between good and evil. -Following the wet plate collodion technique, the Gelatin bromide dry plate process was worked on by several inventors, throughout the 1870’s, with success in 1878, an improvement to a celluloid support instead of glass in 1883, and eventually automated and perfected by George Eastman. It had shorter exposures, more convenience and led to roll film. -French journalist, Ernest Lacan observed in 1852, that, “photography is like a mistress whom one cherishes and hides, about whom one speaks with joy but does not want others to mention”. His observation was directed to painters in regards to the irony of using photography as a source for their work. - Jacques Henri Lartigue was the French amateur photographer that started photographing in 1901, at age 7, with a hand held camera, and continued its use throughout his lifetime to chronicle the unexpected in his photographs. - The Lumiere Brothers invented the positive glass Autochrome plate, in 1907 the principal color photography process available until it was superseded by the advent of subtractive color film during the mid 1930s. -Eugene Atget was the French photographer who documented Old Paris from about 1900-1925, embracing the authentic culture of France that modern technology was destroying, and whose work was later championed by photographer, Berenice Abbott. -In what 1888 was the year the first small hand held single-lens Kodak camera was marketed to target the popular interest of people who wanted to take pictures of the spontaneous and informal events of their everyday lives resulting in a change in the practice, use, and character of photography, especially in cities. -19th C. photographer Henry Peach Robinson adopted combination printing, first working out preliminary sketches into which the photographic parts fit like a quilt or patchwork, claiming, “a method that will not admit of modification of the artist cannot be art”. -Muybridge, Marey, Anshultz, Eakins are four 19th C. photographers, beginning in 1872, and for the next 20 years that devoted themselves to the analysis of motion by the camera, in an effort to understand and record the discrete stages of movement. Fill-in question: Name one 19th C. painter that was greatly influenced by the 19th C. scientific studies of photographic movement? Refer to your notes from class. -Described by Mo-Ti (5th century BC) as a "collecting place" or the "locked treasure room.", this optical device known since ancient times that consists of a box or room with a hole in one side where light from an external scene passes through the hole and strikes a surface inside where it is reproduced, upside-down, but with color and perspective preserved, is referred to as a Camera Obscura. 3 BE ABLE TO ANSWER THESE SHORT ESSAY QUESTIONS: Refer to your class notes, and midterm review notes. TOTAL POINTS POSSIBLE IN THIS SECTION: 18 ANSWER TO THE BEST OF YOUR ABILITY, PARTIAL CREDIT WILL BE GIVEN IF YOU MENTION KEY POINTS. 1. Short Essay Question: Worth 4 points Describe the social and historic significance of the photographs by Alexander Gardner depicting the execution of the Lincoln conspirators. 2. Short Essay Question: Worth 4 points 19th C. photographers approached the landscape with the conviction that the camera might perform a dual function. Explain this purpose briefly. 3. Short Essay Question: Worth 4 Points Photography had a profound influence on French Impressionist painting, name at least two techniques seen in stereographs and other photographs depicting motion that can be found in many paintings from this period? 4. Short Essay Question: 6 Points “Nothing in nature has a hard outline, but everything is seen against something else, and its outlines fade gently into something else, often so subtly that you cannot quite distinguish where one ends and the other begins. In this mingled decision and indecision, this lost and found, lies all the charm and mystery of nature" – PH EMERSON Briefly describe English photographer, P.H.